It's Only A Paper Moon
by MaggieMerc
Summary: Steve visits Peggy after the events of The Winter Soldier and runs into a surprising visitor.


**Author's Note**: This doesn't bridge the gap between parts of Fast Cars and Slow Jazz but it's definitely sort of important and set in the same universe.

####

It's more than a week after the fall of the Triskelion before Steve makes it back to Peggy's bedside. He passes by a young woman with dark glasses and a popped collar who barely glances at him as he moves and thinks she must be a relative of Peggy's. After the Triskelion everyone else stares.

Peggy's sits up in her bed taller than usual with her hands in her lap when she sees him.

"Didn't I tell you we were disasters," she asks severely.

He doesn't want to, but Steve laughs. Which makes his nearly healed ribs twinge painfully. Which has Peggy leaning forward and looking worried.

"I'm all right," he tells her.

She pats her bedside, where Steve never sits. "I was worried about you when I saw the news."

He settles down and tries not to wince again. It's not a special bed just for the former Director of SHIELD as it should be, but one of the thinner traditional VA ones.

She reaches out to clasp his arm. "I'm glad you're all right."

"It was just a little fall—"

"Yes, well you have a habit of going into seventy year comas when you fall out of planes."

It comes out funnier than Steve thinks Peggy meant it to be. Until he sees her smiling. "You can't make me laugh like that. I'm still recuperating."

She's too pleased with herself to care and Steve has to admit he's too pleased with her lucidity to care much either. In fact his cheeks are hurting almost as bad as his ribs.

"And the Winter Soldier?"

Steve stops smiling. "You know about him?"

She plucks at her bedspread with fingers gnarled by time. "He was a thorn in my side for the better part of fifty years."

A thorn. Like Bucky was just something she didn't have the right tweezers on hand to pluck out.

He finds himself digging his fingers into his sides, appalled by the emotions he didn't expect to hit him.

Like anger.

"Did you know who he was," he asks.

"No." And Steve. For the first time. Maybe ever. Doesn't believe Peggy.

He wants to call her to the carpet for the lie. To bring it out right there in the open. Only Peggy's staring out the window wistfully and her hand is rubbing at her knee like there's an old injury causing her a "bother."

"Peggy."

"I had suspicions though. Could never get close enough to find out."

Oh.

"You tried," he asks "But SHIELD doesn't have any records…"

She's so impossibly lucid when she looks at him then. "Some things are always safer off the books Steve. You understand that now don't you?"

It broke a few ribs and nearly killed him, but yes he's learned that particular lesson. He nods.

Then she reaches out for him hand. Her's is so soft and cool and frail. Bruises mottle her paper thin skin. "It's her circulation" they've told him.

"Now," she says, "I'm surprised you're sitting in this sad old room when you could be out there looking for him."

He traces pronounced veins with the edge of his thumb. "I don't think he wants to be found. Not yet."

She hums, "HYDRA's victims rarely do."

"Experience," he jokes.

But Peggy is critical mission serious. "Yes."

####

Steve's on his way out and he's been left more confused than when he went in. Finding Natasha standing at the reception desk with a sad looking bouquet of flowers doesn't help matters.

"Sources told me you were at home," she says sourly when she spies him walking towards her.

"Why are you here Nat?"

She glances down at her flowers. "A woman's not allowed to deliver flowers to fossils?"

"No."

"Exes of fossils?"

He crosses his arms.

"What about rare survivors of the Winter Soldier?"

Steve narrows his eyes, "You said no one ever survived."

"Targets for assassination didn't."

He tilts his head back. It's something he picked up from Phillips and incorporated into his own leadership style. Just a way of studying the other person like he knows what they're thinking and doesn't entirely care. Sometimes they break.

Nat doesn't.

"You're on a fact finding mission."

She shrugs, "Sure."

She's doing that thing she has a bad habit of doing. If the best spy in the world has a tell it's her nonchalance. Sometimes, not often, but **sometimes** she cranks it up to eleven. Is just a little too aggressive with her disinterest.

It's so uncommon that Steve thinks most people don't notice. But you spend a few days on the run from the entire US and world governments with a person and you pick up on some of their quirks.

Nat may be on a mission, but it has nothing to do with old facts.

"Mind if I join you," he says with a big smile.

She gives him a much smaller, tighter, and less pleasant smile in response. "I do, but I get the feeling from the creepy grin that you're gonna insist."

"Color me curious."

"It's nothing you need to worry about," she says on the way back to Peggy's room.

"Peggy'd retired by the time you joined."

"I know."

"So how do you know her?"

She shrugs, "Mission here and there. Your ex was surprisingly active in the late 80s and early 90s."

"And you were ten."

"I was wasn't I?"

Peggy's surprised to see Steve back so soon, and even makes a joke about it. Then Natasha steps around him and looks more bashful than he ever thought her genuinely capable of. And Peggy is that sometimes frigid SSR agent he used to know.

"This is a surprise," she says cooly. Steve thinks he understands how she was director for fifty-plus years.

"I was in the neighborhood," Nat jokes. "Thought I'd-"

"Stop by for a chat?" Peggy's as surly as he's ever seen her.

Nat blushes. Actually **blushes** and Steve thinks he's going to have to tell Sam all about it next time he sees him. Maybe Clint too-though he's really more Nat's friend and might not find it funny.

"Well," Peggy arches an eyebrow like a school marm, "out with it. What do you have to say?"

Nat slaps the flowers down on Peggy's bedspread, "a lot until you started talking. I was coming here to **apologize**-"

"And doing a bang up job."

Nat groans, "This! This is why the only people who visit you are the ones living under rocks the last seventy years."

"Hey," Steve yelps.

"Is that a fact? I thought it was because you and your lot murdered or abducted them all."

"I'm one of the good guys now Carter."

"Saving the world from a handful of aliens doesn't just absolve you of all your crimes-"

Steve interjects, "it was a more than a few."

"It was an **invasion**. Miss Union Jack here's just miffed she was laid up in bed and missed it."

"Don't call me that," Peggy growls.

"Who calls you Miss Union Jack," Steve asks.

The question, while very genuine, is really meant more to derail the two women into silence.

Thankfully it works. Because Peggy opens her mouth to respond and then scowls and Nat flops into a chair and crosses her arms like a surly teenager.

Then she kicks the flowers closer to Peggy with her heel. "These are for you."

"They're lovely," Peggy says—tone still biting.

Steve settles back down into his usual chair.

An awkward silence stretches.

And stretches.

And stretches.

A super soldier, a super spy and a spy master are apparently not the threesome to come to for conversation. If Sam were in the room he'd probably start laughing. It'd break the silence and Nat would smile ruefully and Peggy would catch Steve's eye and this oppressive cloud of awkwardness hovering over them would dissipate.

Steve is not Sam.

"So you two go way back huh?"

Nat glances at Peggy and then away and then back again. Finally she sighs. "I came to thank you Carter."

"Thank me? For not having you killed years ago?"

She snorts and everyone in the room knows that it would have taken a helluva SHIELD detail to take Nat out.

"I read the files SHIELD has on…a lot of people."

Nat rivals only Tony Stark when it comes to obsessively pouring over every single SHIELD file now made public.

"There were a lot of things…missing."

The lines around Peggy's mouth deepen as she purses her lips and says nothing.

"I'm grateful, but I'm not exactly sure why." To Nat Peggy seems to be a puzzle. "You hate me."

"I never hated you Natasha." Peggy glances at Steve and for the first time he regrets joining this conversation. Because Peggy looks shy. And, just a little, ashamed. "I just hated some of the choices you made."

"So why scrub the files?"

"You know why."

Now Nat's glancing at Steve too, and if it wouldn't make things even more awkward he'd make an excuse and leave.

"For her?" There's a lot of wonder in Nat's question.

"I never quite believed in you, but she always has."

"Even after-"

"She believed in you from the very beginning. That never changed."

Nat laughs. It's soft and surrendering. "She was an idiot."

Peggy murmurs an agreement.

Steve doesn't have even the beginning of a clue as to who they're talking about and he's not about to ask them to fill him in. He's already enough of an intruder into their private conversation and he figures that whomever it is they're talking about can stay private too.

With the shit raining down on all of them because of HYDRA at least someone should get to keep their privacy.

And who better than an optimist who doesn't even have to be in the room to make Peggy Carter and the Black Widow smile.


End file.
